Obama’s Pakistan Nightmare
January 13, 2009
Every few months someone in Washington — either at the Pentagon, or the Energy Department, or on the campus of the National Defense University — runs a simulation of how the United States should respond if a terrorist group infiltrates the Pakistani nuclear program or manages to take over one or two of its weapons. In these exercises, everyone plays to type: the State Department urges negotiations, while the Joint Special Forces Command loads its soldiers and nuclear teams into airplanes. The results of these simulations are highly classified, for fear of tipping off the Pakistanis about what the United States knows and doesn’t know about the location of the country’s weapons. But most of these war games conclude in a sea of ambiguity, with the participants who are playing top officials in Islamabad and Washington unable to get a clear picture of what happened and, if something is missing, the Pakistanis unwilling to admit it. As one frequent participant in these tabletop exercises put it to me, “Most of them don’t end well.”
Read Full Article | David E. Sanger | New York Times
